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Mark Rowlands is a writer and philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami and the author of several books on the philosophy of mind, the moral status of non-human animals, and cultural criticism. He is known within academic philosophy for his work on the animal mind and is one of the principal architects of the view known as vehicle externalism, or the extended mind, the view that thoughts, memories, desires and beliefs can be stored outside the brain and the skull. His books include Animal Rights, The Body in Mind, The Nature of Consciousness, Animals Like Us, The Happiness of Dogs and a personal memoir, The Philosopher and the Wolf. His latest book is The Word of Dog.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”

Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

00:00 Clips

01:01 Welcome

– Previous episode links: Frans de Waal, Marc Bekoff, Jessica Pierce, Michael Hauskeller

03:20 Mark’s Intro

– 20-something books… the mind, moral consideration, animals, environment, the meaning of life…

– “The Word of Dog… an exploration of the idea of meaning in life through the ideas provided by a series of dogs”

– Luna joins the chat

05:25 What’s Real?

– “We weren’t a religious family… I never went to church”

– Mother’s father was an Anglican vicar “that just put her off formal religion”

– “The younger me was hostile [towards religious or supernatural ideas]… I just didn’t buy it… I was just a firm, died in the wool naturalist… we’re just physical organism – when we die we die”

– “I’ve come to the view that ‘real’ is ambiguous”

– Two different perspectives: from the outside and from the inside

– “…from the outside I’m just an unremarkable being in an unremarkable world who leads an unremarkable life”

– “From the inside our lives are hubs of meaning and purpose… we matter… what we want matters deeply to us”

– Tom Nagels’ paper “The Absurd”: “We have these two different views of reality – we know they both can’t be true because they’re incompatible but we can’t bring ourselves to get rid of either one of them… Our existence in this sense is absurd… it doesn’t make sense.”

– #wittgenstein : “Our lives have no limit in the sense that our visual field has no limit”

– “We find it very difficult to understand the idea of death… but we know that there is an end”

– “Which is more real? [the view from the outside or the inside]… to which do we attach the word ‘real’?… It’s not clear that there’s a straightforward answer…”

– JW: Is suggesting that the subjective is just another part of objective reality a potential resolution?

– “That move always requires tacitly bringing the view from the outside to the view from the inside”

– “A supernatural answer… appealing to spirits and strange things like that… I don’t think that’s a legitimate move either”

– “The view from the inside is very, very mysterious in a way the supernatural is not. The supernatural is mundane, really.”

– “When we ask questions like ‘How does consciousness produce this view from the inside?’… bringing a view from the outside… you’ve got these brain processes and you’ve got this consciousness… that is making consciousness an object”

– #sartre “There’s consciousness as object… [and] consciousness as lived”

– The hard problem of consciousness is about how we get from one object (brain processes etc.) to another (consciousness itself) vs consciousness as lived “as revealing activity… reveals the world as being a certain way.”

– Do dogs have epistemology? How do they come to believe things?

– The Wittgenstein view “We’re all philosophers”

– Dogs: “I don’t know if we’d understand their philosophical assumptions”

– “Whether or not we understand their [dogs] philosophical assumptions they can point the way to solving philosophical problems for us even though they have no idea that these problems exist.”

– “Certain problems, anxieties… that arise for us and they don’t arise for a creature like a dog… Understanding why… can help us with the anxiety”

– JW: Can reflection sometimes be a problem? Overthinking, doing your own research?

– “Reflection is a fantastic capacity that has done wonders for us as a species”

– “The fundamental loss – reflection makes us troubled creatures in the way that dogs and other animals are not… troubled mental states.”

– “Dogs believe things… sometimes those things are true and sometimes those things are false [e.g. Shadow mistaking a frond of grass for an iguana]”

– “We can kill our beliefs on our own. As soon as we have a belief… we start fretting… paradoxically we have this healthy approach to belief formation which at the same time condemns us to being a certain sort of creature that’s troubled in a way that dogs are not”

– Sartre: “By its nature a belief is always a troubled belief”

– “Maybe there are certain circumstances… where we just need to lighten up a little and not worry so much about things”

27:40 What (and Who) Matters?

– Morals shaped significantly by Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation” (see Peter’s two Sentientism appearances here and here) “his utilitarianism was fairly muted… the main argument was… the equal consideration of interests… your interests count as much as mine… a very powerful idea. It persuaded me.”

– “His utilitarianism is a way of interpreting this idea of equal consideration of interests… aggregation of desires or preferences… I didn’t follow Singer in that direction”

– “I have an eclectic view… I’m not sure which, if any, is the one true moral theory”… utilitarianism, deontology (Tom Regan), contractualism…

– Contractualism “The one moral view that seemed to make the case for animal rights very difficult… as it’s usually understood… in order to have rights you have to be the sort of creature who can make and abide by agreements with others” JW: “So young humans are out.”  MR: “I was concerned with developing more plausible accounts of contractualism that didn’t have this implication… animals and the case of these humans who also get excluded”

– “Many people… professional philosophers… the public found this idea very difficult to swallow… all interests should be considered equal unless there’s some morally relevant difference between humans and non-human animals… the argument is in fact impeccable I also noticed that it didn’t obtain the widespread satisfaction that it should logically.”

– “Part of the power of the idea of equal consideration is that the seeds of the extension of this principle are part of the content of the principle itself”

– “I matter… you matter too… the same is true of all humans… there’s no morally relevant difference between me and other human beings. The extension to animals is just part of this overall dialectic or argument… there are no morally relevant differences between many non-human animals and humans…”

– “The argument from species overlap… [e.g. intelligence as a morally relevant difference]… some humans… are not more intelligent than any animal. Then we have a choice – either we demote these humans and treat them the way we currently treat animals or we promote animals and treat them the way we treat these humans”

– Developing additional arguments beyond the equal consideration of interests?

– “A much less controversial principle… you teach to children… distinguish between what they need and what they want… it tracks a difference between crucial or vital interests and non-vital interests… what you need are vital interests and what you want are non-vital interests”

– “Whenever… there’s a clash of interests then you can allow that the vital interests of humans always trump the vital interests of non-human animals. You can allow that the non-vital interests of humans always trump the non-vital interests of non-human animals. But what you can’t allow is that the non-vital interests of humans trump the vital interests of animals because that in effect is treating them as if they don’t count morally speaking”

– “If someone decides to kidnap you and harvest your kidneys because they want to sell them on the black market to buy a Ferrari. They’re treating you as if you don’t count morally speaking. They’re placing their non-vital interests in owning a Ferrari over your vital interests in having functioning kidneys.”

– JW: “Setting a baseline for the meaning of the words compassion, care or consideration or moral status to mean anything”

– “If the kidney thief tries to convince you that he does think that you do count morally then that’s just a sham”

– JW: “What’s the point of having a moral stance if you don’t do anything about it?”

– “Pretty much everyone, a few psychopaths aside, are going to accept that animals count morally to some extent… it’s one thing to take a chainsaw to a living tree – it may be regrettable for various reason… but it’s quite another thing to take a chainsaw to a living dog… if you accept that then you accept that dogs exist morally… they have some kind of moral status”

– “Whenever you override the vital interests of something to further the non-vital interests of something else… you’re basically treating them as if they don’t count”

– “It’s wrong morally speaking to treat something that counts morally as if it doesn’t count morally… from that basic idea you can get most of the prohibitions against treating animals the way we do”

– “Eating animals for food almost certainly involves a violation of their most vital interests… they life horrific lives, die horrific deaths… in essence for pleasures of the palate. We don’t need to eat the food – it’s not a need it’s a want”

– “You can extend it to animal research as well… that just is ineffective”

45:50 Who Matters?

– JW: “What matters and then who matters?… you cannot and you should not separate those questions… they are intrinsically and deeply linked”

– Mark’s journey: “A dim lightbulb moment… there’s something not right” (at about 5 years old)

– “When my father was a kid he had a German Shepherd called Rex… the Rowlands family at this time also had a pig… my father was very fond of the pig… Rex lived a long and happy life and things went rather differently for the pig… something is not right here… I was very young… something fishy about this story”

– At 5 years old “I didn’t have a lot of agency… [to way] ‘right we’re all going to go vegan!’”

– JW: The ancient roots of sentiocentric compassion back to early humanity and maybe even before

– JW: Can dogs and other non-human animals be moral?

– Travelling in northern India in the 1980s. “There was a dog that used to hang out with the monkeys. I used to see the monkeys stroking and petting it… like humans did… possibly at that moment there was a kind of dim ‘aha’… this seems to be very human in some respects”

– “Philosophical issues tend to die a certain death… the death of equivocation”

– “Can animals be moral?… I wrote a book about it… spoiler alert – yes they can”

– “The dominant conception [of acting morally]… In order to behave morally you need to be able to reflect on your motivations… ‘Is this an inclination I should resist or… embrace?’… How do you answer this question? Well you bring to bear your favourite moral principles… utilitarian… Kantian… but the general model is more general than those specific moral principles… you have to be able to scrutinise your motivations”

– “I’m reasonably sure dogs don’t do that… but there is another way of understanding moral behaviour that’s associated with the Scottish philosopher David Hume… you act morally when you have emotions and these emotions… take the others’ wellbeing as their object.”

– Becoming a father at 44 years old “My new son would be sharing a house with Nina who was an old and distinctly cantankerous German Shepherd / Malamute mix and Tess who was a wolf hybrid who was very sweet but had some quite noticeable predatory instincts”

– “They turned out to be better parents than me… if my son so much as squeaked in the middle of the night then these two cold noses would be pressed against my face… ‘wake up you negligent father your son needs you!’… They were distressed by his distress…”

– If the dogs were just annoyed by the sound they could have moved to another part of the house – but “the dogs were distressed because the baby’s distressed… there was more going on… it elicited helping behaviour… they wanted to stop the distress itself… the dogs were distressed that the baby was distressed… once you have that kind of emotion… then you have the basis of moral emotions… not simply because of the distress they’re about the distress of the other”

– “They have a moral emotion whose content is the distress of the baby… this gives you another way of understanding what moral behaviour is”

– “What happens with the question of ‘can animals be moral?’ it turns into a fight between the Aristotelian / Kantian reflective view… and the Humean, more visceral, emotive view. I think… the Kantian / Aristotelian view is not very plausible at all”

– “I recognise the futility in philosophy of trying to convince people… of the error of their ways…”

– “There are different ways of behaving morally and animals can certainly behave morally in some of those ways… the ways animals are moral coincides with the way humans are moral most of the time. This scrutiny of motivations I think is a very rare phenomenon that probably only happens when something has gone seriously wrong”

– JW: “We might pretend to be super-reflective but much more of our human morality is driven by the same dog-style morality”

– “That’s undeniable although it being undeniable doesn’t stop a lot of people from denying it”

– JW: The limits of emotional / relational / love based ethics? “Shadow’s behaviour towards iguanas or Luna’s behaviour towards squirrels or in-group humans behaviour towards out-group humans…” and the need for a more reflective ethics when it comes to moral scope?

– “If animals can be moral then they can be moral without having explicit moral principles… having explicit moral principles sometimes does help a lot”

– JW: What if we’re sceptical of agency and free will? Can morality and justice survive if everything is “just” physics operating? Aaron Rabinowitz’s “luck pilling”

– JW: Sentientist Justice? Dropping retribution but keeping restoration, rehabilitation, education, deterrence…

– “If you want to take seriously the idea that animals can be moral one distinction you have to make… is that between the evaluation of an agent and the evaluation of motivations”

– Imagining Hitler in a “hard determinism world… people can’t be held responsible for what they do… there’s nothing they can do to change anything”

– “In that world we might want to say ‘we can’t evaluate Hitler because he had no say, no choice in what he did – it was all inevitable’… but it doesn’t follow from this that we can’t evaluate his motivations. Sending 6 million people to the gas chambers – that’s a morally evil motivation. So the motivation can be assessed… even if the person can’t be”

– “We don’t want to go back to a situation… legal trials for animals as they had in earlier times… some poor pig eats turnips from the wrong farmers field – they get hauled up before the magistrate”

– “What we need is a logical space where the motivations can be assessed even if the actors can’t”

– “Animals as moral subjects – they have moral motivations which can be good or bad – but they themselves can’t be assessed as good or bad”

– “Moral subjects… a part of logical space between moral patients on the one hand and moral agents on the other… they’re motivated to act by emotions that take the wellbeing of another as their object”

– JW: Going beyond sentience? Biocentrism, Ecocentrism, Holism?

– “The clearest argument you can give for extending moral consideration beyond humans appeals to sentience… I don’t know of a similarly convincing argument that tries to base it on biocentrism or ecocentrism… anything you get from that you can probably get from an instrumental conception where it’s impact on creatures that are sentient that’s the important thing.”

01:10:10 A Better World and The Meaning of Life?

– “The easiest thing to do… is to appeal to human self-interest… that’s far more effective than appealing to morality or logic”

– Climate change and our potential futures “If we get to 10 degrees Centigrade [of warming] then we should expect… extinction rates of 90-95%”

– “Our treatment of animals is at the heart of everything we do environmentally… we have no hope unless we fundamentally change the way we interact with animals… in particular we can’t afford to eat them any more – that was a different time”

– “We’re hoping that society doesn’t fall apart… we know we can’t go on burning fossil fuels… CCS [carbon capture and sequestration technology] doesn’t yet exist… we need fuel sources with EROIs in the region of 14-25:1 [the ratio between energy inputs for obtaining and outputs from use]… this is not likely to work… nuclear – on the cusp of viability…”

– “Given this is the situation with our fuel sources we need to seriously address the way we look at another source of energy – the animals we eat… where the EROIs are upside down… you have to put in roughly 50x as much energy to get the same amount of energy out of a certain quantity of beef”

– “Animal agriculture is responsible for 14.5% of global emissions… you take those sorts of numbers out it gives you time to develop… renewables… and you have huge swathes of land… billions and billions of hectares that you can now use for reforestation” JW: “That’s a sequestration technology that actually works”

– “We need this land to cool the planet and therefore we can’t afford to put animals [and feed crops] on it to eat”

– JW: Are there risks of ethical bypassing if we rely on environmental arguments to end animal agriculture – or might the transition free people up to put their latent compassionate ethics into practice

– “I’m probably a more jaded person… I’ve written I can’t remember how many books on animal rights… have any of them done any good… have any of them persuaded anyone who wasn’t already persuaded? I don’t know…”

– “I suspect that self-interest is more motivational than doing the right thing. It turns out that… the right thing would be to have vast parts of the planet where humans are not allowed to go.”

– “96% of mammalian biomass on the planet now is now made up either of humans or animals that humans eat… 70% of avian biomass is made up of fowl that we eat… at the end of the last major ice age… a fantastic bestiary of incredible creatures… We came along and we relocated the biomass… we took it from these fantastic animals… and we put it into us and animals we like to eat. The world is a poorer place for it… we’re like ungrateful children and we need to be kept away from most of the world.”

– JW: The limits of “self-help” e.g. Stoicism “It seems to be very centred on how I feel and how I can cope with stuff… it doesn’t really engage that richly with how to be a good person in the wider world – and certainly doesn’t question the anthropocentric moral scope”

– “I suspect they’re distinct [meaning of my life vs. making a better world]… even horrible people can have meaningful lives… I don’t think it’s a moral issue at all”

– Camus’ question “why not commit suicide?”

– Mark’s work on extending “The Veil of Ignorance” to include non-human animals

01:26:20 Follow Mark:

– The Word of Dog

– Mark on PhilPeople

– Mark at the University of Miami

– Mark on Wikipedia

Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop.